thursday january 15 Discover Stars on Ice: Kristi Yamaguchi, Scott Hamilton, Ekaterina Gordeeva, Kurt Browning, Katarina Witt, Paul Wylie, Brian Orser and other superstars of the thermally challenged set take the ice, under the direction of Sandra Bezic and Michael Seibert, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, January 15, at America West…
Hard Rain doesn’t display a lot of belief in human consistency. In this exceedingly odd little picture, responsible characters are suddenly corrupted into greedy, murderous marauders. People who seem like the salt of the earth are revealed to have been schemers all along. One fellow picks just about the least…
thursday january 8 “How Safe Is Our Food Supply?” Luncheon: Arizona Department of Agriculture director Sheldon Jones and California Department of Food and Agriculture secretary Ann Veneman speak about this topic at the Arizona Forum Luncheon at noon Thursday, January 8, at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix Civic Plaza, 122 North…
thursday january 1 Craig Shoemaker at the Improv: The alchemical comedian has transformed a miserable childhood as a hopeless geek into a he-man mint–he was the American Comedy Awards pick for best standup comedian of 1997, he’s slated to host this year’s VH1 game show My Generation, and he’s to…
There’s no earthly reason we needed a live-action feature version of Mr. Magoo. But since we got one anyway, it should be said that there’s no real excuse for it having turned out so miserably. If a kiddy movie doesn’t even have the charm or inventiveness of the goofy little…
thursday december 25 Salvation Army Christmas Dinner: If you’re using this publication for warmth as well as reading material, you may want to drop by this free, open-to-the-public repast in Exhibit Halls A and B at Phoenix Civic Plaza, Second Street and Adams, from noon to 2 p.m. Thursday, December…
Deconstructing Harry opens riotously with a middle-aged man and his lover–who is also his sister-in-law–surreptitiously coupling at a family get-together. It seems at first that we’re about to be shown the story of this pair (Richard Benjamin and Julia Louis-Dreyfus). But before long, we realize that neither of them is…
Macaulay Culkin’s replacement in the new Home Alone 3 owns a pet rat. If Mouse Hunt, the DreamWorks attempt at a holiday family comedy, hits it big, members of the Home Alone bunch may kick themselves. Why try to package a skin-crawly brat as America’s darling, when you can just…
Incongruous amid the cotton fields of Avondale, just off Interstate 10, there rises a huge, imposing structure that seems simultaneously futuristic, retro and decrepit. It’s the ruin of an abandoned horse-racing grandstand, glowering down on a track long since overgrown. A real estate white elephant, it’s nonetheless an atmospheric spot…
Despite the reputations of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, it’s doubtful that Arthur Miller ever really topped his first major play, 1947’s All My Sons. With the possible exception of his 1964 Incident at Vichy–another neglected work–Miller hasn’t marshaled so much power with so little windiness. The current…
For some reason, the gifted actress Kasi Lemmons–she played Jodie Foster’s roommate in The Silence of the Lambs and the interviewer in Fear of a Black Hat–hasn’t become a star. So she’s become a filmmaker instead. Her first feature as writer/director is the coming-of-age story Eve’s Bayou. Set among the…
Ignorance is bliss and success and virtue. The spoils of life go not to the planners but to those who are too dim to know the risks they’re taking. That very American notion was the theme of Forrest Gump; less cosmically–but also much less pretentiously–it’s the gag engine behind the…
Weed is a documentary chronicle of the “8th Annual Cannabis Cup & Hemp Expo,” a competition among the marijuana coffee houses in that fabled civil-libertarian utopia known as Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Thousands of potheads from all around the world–but mostly Americans–pay a small fee for the privilege of sampling the…
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control sounds like an old exploitation title, but it belongs to the latest of the idiosyncratic documentaries of Errol Morris. This one interweaves interviews with four men of peculiar occupation, linked only by their study of animal form and function. Dave Hoover trains big cats…
Three Halloweens ago, Tempe’s Valley Art Theatre hosted a screening of Universal’s 1925 horror classic The Phantom of the Opera, with live-organ accompaniment. On the night before Halloween this year, the admirable experiment is being repeated on a grander scale. Organist Rob Richards, who played the Valley Art show on…
In The Myth of Fingerprints, middle-class white people gather at their parents’ home for Thanksgiving, lovers in tow, to snipe at one another and bellyache about how horrible home life used to be. This description would also cover Home for the Holidays of two years ago. Myth’s people are a…
All through Shakespeare’s great, self-questioning war whoop Henry V, the Chorus keeps coming on, apologizing to the audience for the theater’s limitations in presenting grand scenes like battles or troop movements. It’s false modesty, of course–Shakespeare, the “bending author” through whose “rough and all-unable pen” (fishing for compliments, are we,…
On the wintry Sabbath referred to by the title of Jonathan Nossiter’s Sunday, a middle-aged homeless man wanders the streets of Queens. Nothing new there. His name is Oliver (David Suchet), and he used to be a married, white-collar company man with IBM, but now he’s divorced, alone, sleeping in…
What a relief it is to see a movie like James Dean: Race With Destiny. It had begun to feel as if the bad movie were dead–not gone, of course; as long as there are movies, most of them will be crummy. But in recent years, movie badness has been…
The first scene of Different for Girls is both lyrical and chilling–a teenage boy (Stephen Walker) showers in a school locker room, posed like a Raphaelite statue, with his genitals tucked out of sight. Classmates, fully clothed, approach him through the steam and begin to harass him, until another boy…
You can recognize a lady by her elegant hair/but a genuine princess is exceedingly rare . . . –Once Upon a Mattress In the states, we make up for not having our own actual royalty by slinging regal titles as insults: Welfare Queen, Jewish American Princess, royal pain–even kingpin has…
Not long ago, a catalogue arrived at my home called Signals: A Catalog for Fans and Friends of Public Television. Among its wares is a variety of merchandising derived from trendy PBS shows. It offers Are You Being Served? videos, a Keeping Up Appearances etiquette book, a replica of Mr…
